The cavernous main hold was turned into a geophysics laboratory augmented by smaller labs, offices, and data storage rooms. The refrigeration units were left in place, but now they worked to keep the sophisticated computer system at a constant temperature.
The computers themselves were huge, taking up nearly two thousand square feet of space for the main-frames and half again as much for the peripherals. There was more computing power aboard the August Rose than at Baikanor, Russia’s equivalent of Cape Canaveral. Enough cargo space remained for the August Rose to operate under the cover of a refrigerator ship, though she could no longer haul enough frozen goods to ever turn a profit, yet the ruse allowed her to sail the Pacific unimpeded.
Valery reached the main laboratory through a torturous maze of bulkhead doors and narrow companionways. The final door was secured by a magnetic keycard lock. A guard noted his time of entry on a log sheet and took custody of his card, which would have been erased by the magnetic fields created by the equipment in the lab.
It was past midnight, but nearly a dozen scientists, technicians, and assistants were at work, monitoring the numerous sensors that hung from two towed arrays beneath the vessel’s keel. A large metal plotting table dominated the center of the room. Above it, on an articulating arm, a holographic laser projector hung down like some monstrous dentist’s drill. Bundles of fiber-optic cables ran from the projector to the mainframe computer and to the table itself.
Pytor Borodin was seated at the console nearest the projection table, his slim body hidden under a voluminous white lab coat. Valery took a deep breath of the filtered, sterilized air and strode across the rubber-tiled floor.
“Working late again, Father?”
He might have been the oldest member of the scientific team by twenty years, but Pytor Borodin kept a pace that far surpassed that of all his staff, including his second-in-command. He usually spent thirty-six hours in the computer room before taking a grudging six-hour break for sleep. His crumpled appearance alarmed his son.
“Father, have you been taking your medication?”
“No,” the elder scientist fired back irritably. “That Coumadin is nothing more than rat poison and Vasotec, the beta blocker, affects my breathing because of the air-conditioning. Now don’t bother me again about my heart. Have a look at this; we’ve gotten the cameras back on line.”
Valery glanced at the monitor and saw a close approximation of hell on earth. Dangling from a Kevlar cable and encased in carbon fiber with a thick artificial sapphire lens cover, the camera hung directly above the central vent of the fastest growing volcano in the world. Molten rock, forced upward by the tremendous heat engine of the earth’s core, poured through the narrow rent in the crust in a never-ending stream, amid billowing clouds of noxious gas and dissolved minerals. There was no microphone attached to the camera, but Valery could almost hear the protesting moans as the earth vomited up her guts.
“The rate has increased again,” Valery remarked.
“And?”
“The flow is forming more westerly now.”
“Right, it’s caught in the North Equatorial Gyre, just as I’d predicted.”
“But that current only moves maybe three miles per day. Surely that can’t cause a shift in the formation of the cone.”
“It wouldn’t normally, no, but the rate of ejection from the volcano is so great that the two forces create a skew in the lava flow. It’s a simple matter of vectors. I’m glad you’re here, Valery, the computer is about finished with the past day’s data and is ready for a growth projection.”
Because of the massive amount of raw data gathered by the sensors and the inherently chaotic movement of anything within nature’s realm, the August Rose needed huge computers in order to create a reasonable prediction of the volcano’s future growth. Even with the gigabytes of power, the computers needed a full twenty-four hours to remap, down to the millimeter, the thrusting cone below the ship and then to predict where the cone would broach the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
The countdown clock on one computer screen indicated that the holographic projection would be complete in one minute and twenty seconds. Valery and his father waited in silence, both preferring to stare at the camera images than fake inane conversation. Pytor Borodin didn’t seem to notice the tension between them, but Valery was well aware.
Finally the counter ran down to zero, and Pytor Borodin activated the holographic imager. The model projected against the plotting table began as just a hazy conical outline, but quickly sharpened. Crags, radiating dikes, and smaller vents were easily distinguished. The projection looked as solid as a plaster cast but was composed entirely of laser beams.
“Activating the extrapolation logarithms.”
The computer had already done the tens of billions of calculations necessary to predict the growth of the volcano, so the image began to change immediately. A shimmering blue plane representing the ocean’s surface appeared and the volcano quickly rose through it, tiny simulated waves pounding against the bleak basalt shores.
Borodin pressed several more buttons on his console and longitude and latitude lines were added to the projection, accurate to the second of a degree.
With a note of satisfaction, Pytor Borodin remarked, “This is the third straight test where the summit has broached more than a thousand meters outside of Hawaii’s two-hundred-mile exclusionary limit. I think it is now time to inform Kerikov.” He turned to a female assistant. “Tell the captain that I wish us to remain on the site for an additional twenty-four hours.”
She nearly bowed as she left the lab. Borodin strode back to his console and called to the room at large, “Reset the sensors and the computers. I want to run another simulation immediately.”
Just as Valery turned to go, his father grabbed him lightly by the arm. “You have yet to see the latest from the gas spectrometry lab.”
The two left the lab together, Borodin’s hand still on his son’s arm, as if he expected him to bolt at any moment.
The spectrometry lab was crammed with gleaming stainless steel equipment and several computer monitors slaved to the mainframe. The gas spectrometer itself was as large as an automobile, but infinitely more complex. It used the spectrum of light given off by vaporized material to decode its chemical composition. The system was also paired with a seismic wave echo sounder as a backup.
“Vassily, show our second-in-command what you showed me earlier this evening.” Borodin never called Valery his son.
The sheets of paper the scientist thrust into Valery’s hands were covered in bands of rainbow hues broken up by black lines of varying thicknesses. The lines corresponded to the wavelengths of light absorbed by the vaporized materials.
As easily as a geographer deciphering the myriad lines on a topographical map, Valery leafed through pages, noting no deviations from the normal composition of asthenospheric magma, until he came to the last set of spectrographic images.
He recognized the lines denoting basalt, silica, and ferro-magnesium, but there was also a series of conspicuous lines indicating the presence of vanadium, and next to that, a jumble of alternating thick and thin lines that he had never seen before.
“The earliest writings on alchemy date from the mid-fifth century and have been found in Arab and Chinese codices as well as European,” Pytor Borodin said softly, looking over his son’s shoulder at the printout. “For the following twelve centuries, alchemists represented the best scientific minds of their time and gave rise to modern chemistry and pharmacology, yet they all failed at their self-appointed task. Not one was ever able to transmute lead into gold.